Professor Siddharthan Chandran, a neurologist involved with the Centre for Regenerative Medicine, has given a TED talk about using stem cells to help damaged brains heal faster.
Dr Chandran suggests that neurological diseases are becoming an urgent health issue around the world, affecting 35 million people and costing more than USD $700 billion annually. The prevalence of these diseases is increasing as people begin to live longer.
To understand how neurological disease affects the brain, it is necessary to understand how the brain works at a basic level. Two important cell types in the brain are nerve cells and myelinating cells (the insulating cell). When they work together with other cells they produce electrical activity that makes the brain function.
If the brain has damaged wiring caused by disease or injury, you start to get disruptions in the electrical connections that can affect not only a person’s mind but their body. For example, malfunctioning motor nerve cells in the brain can result in motor neuron disease, impacting the function of the entire body.
When myelinating cells die and the electrical signals cannot reach their destination, other diseases appear, such as multiple sclerosis (MS).
While the brain is very resilient and can repair itself, it cannot always repair itself fully. The repairs that the brain does make to itself are a result of stem cells within the brain attempting to fix the problems they find. Some drugs may be able to help the brain repair itself, but they are very difficult to identify because of the complex way the brain works.
Dr Chandran suggests that scientists can use stem cells to help damaged brains in two ways.
Firstly, stem cells can be used to help develop and test new drugs. After taking some cells from a person with a brain disease like multiple sclerosis, scientists can create Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs). These stem cells will carry any genetic trait which allowed the disease to form.
Scientists can then compare those stem cells to healthy relatives to look for any anomalies. They can also develop the stem cells into brain cells and test drugs on those cells in a petri dish. The approach will also allow the development of personalised medicines that treat very specific illnesses.
The other way scientists can use stem cells to help damaged brains is by transplanting healthy stem cells into a patient. The healthy cells can increase the rate of repair on the brain. There have already been some positive results with using stem cell transplants to treat brain injuries caused by stroke. It is clear that stem cells have a very important role to play in the treatment of damaged brains.
Source: Can the damaged brain repair itself?
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